How secure are we?

On the 7th of the next month is the anniversary of that awful day which happened now nearly two years ago,when as the newspapers said, “terror came to our shores”.

It was a bleak day, not only because 52 lives were lost, made more sinister because the bombers were young men who were born and brought up in this country. It is rare that terrorist want to kill their countrymen and wreck havoc in their homeland. There was something quite painful and alarming, to hear Siddique Khan`s thick Yorkshire accent and his pronouncement of death and destruction. The police seemed as taken aback and shocked as the rest of us were.

Since then the investigation has moved on, some people have been arrested,and many stories have emerged.

The Sunday Times led the way last year, by suggesting that investigators have found a police-style tracking device in the car belonging to Mohammed Siddique Khan, the leader of the London bombing.

It is speculated that Special Branch planted the bug in a surveillance operation against some Yorkshire Muslims. Who were suspected of involvement in terrorism.Since the fertiliser bomb plot has come to light and arguments have raged,and the police have accepted that it was an oversight that the 7/7 bombers were not put under survellence.

A book written by an American journalist Ron Suskind claims that Khan was not only known to the secret services, he was so dangerous that the American authorities have banned him from flying to their country two years before the bombing.

Though the FBI deny this and suggest that the author has confused Khan with Mohammed Ajmal Khan, who was involved in buying weapons for Pakistani terrorists, and is now in jail.

While we were told by the police that these men were not known to the authorities, and as they call it were, “clean skins. The intelligence and security committee, which scrutinises the secret services, concluded that both the bombers were at the periphery of an ongoing investigation.

Amid these claims and counter claims, what about us the ordinary folks in this country and how safe do we feel, and is the investigation any nearer to finding the plotters and the backers of those atrocities?

The performance of the police has come under a lot of criticism. The lack of co-ordination between them and the secret services is not conducive to national security.

Families have been devastated and lives lost. It seems that during the investigations there was poor coordination between the police themselves.

As a mother myself, I was moved to read the extracts from a book written by Marie-Fatayi-Williams. Whose Son Anthony was killed in the bomb blast? When she arrived from Nigeria and made that memorable appeal on the television to find “her Anthony”. She found a police service un-able to cope. She was frantic with worry, but every time she rang a given number the operator on the other side of the phone didn’t know who she was. Officers who didn’t seem to have any record of her previous statements repeatedly interviewed her. And while all this was going on, the police knew that Anthony was dead and was lying in the morgue.

They withheld this information, until they have interviewed the family again and again to eliminate any terrorist links. Whatever the reason it shows a callous disregard for parent’s feelings. I remember ,reading her story in the Sunday Telegraph and feeling for her as a mother.

And she says she was not alone in these suffering, in-group meetings a lot more families told the same story. Many families from London suffered too.

She concludes by saying that she asks herself that if this had been an atrocity at the level of 9/11,how would the British authorities cope?

How indeed. It was reported today that a suspect who was involved in terror camps,was employed by London Underground.He was put under probation,and then sectioned under mental health act,and then he absconded from the mental hospital.The news of his escape was not made public,and it is only today that the courts have lifted the ban,so we can hear the detailes.

So how are we the citizens of this country are meant to feel? Are we safe or do we have cause to worry?Am afraid am not sure.The recent record of the government is not very re-assuring.